This week, we announced a change to Blogger’s porn policy. We’ve had a ton of feedback, in particular about the introduction of a retroactive change (some people have had accounts for 10+ years), but also about the negative impact on individuals who post sexually explicit content to express their identities. So rather than implement this change, we’ve decided to step up enforcement around our existing policy prohibiting commercial porn.

Blog owners should continue to mark any blogs containing sexually explicit content as “adult” so that they can be placed behind an “adult content” warning page.

Bloggers whose content is consistent with this and other policies do not need to make any changes to their blogs.

In a sharp policy U-turn, Google is warning users of its Blogger platform that they must remove all graphic images and videos or face having their blog yanked from public view.

Google blogs – which have “blogger” or “blogspot” in their URLs – number in the many millions and include topics from makeup tips to X-rated material.

But from March 23, says the company, all this changes, and “you won’t be able to publicly share images and video that are sexually explicit or show graphic nudity on Blogger.”

Existing blogs that contravene this rule won’t actually be deleted, but will be set to “private”, so that they can only be seen by their owners or by anybody that’s been specifically invited. New blogs, though, could be pulled altogether.

The only exception will be content that “offers a substantial public benefit, for example in artistic, educational, documentary, or scientific contexts”.

This month’s thing was to go back and take a look at settings in all these accounts we’ve been creating. Well, maybe not all of them, but pick a couple and take a look. Maybe there were new settings available to us that weren’t there before. Maybe we’ve had a change of heart about how much we want to share. This was a good reminder that we should take a look every once in a while.

My problem is that I sign up for everything. It’s part of my job. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. For the sites that I use regularly I keep pretty well on top of the available settings. The one experience for this month though was looking at my Blogger account.

Since I’ve pretty much moved everything to my own WordPress installations, my Blogger account has pretty much fallen by the wayside. But I do still use it for a few things like posting to Nebraska Learns 2.0. So, I logged in and settings weren’t much the issue for me, but the number of defunct blogs I had in my account. I cleared those out as they just no longer served any purpose. (For those of you wondering about the archival worth of these blogs, they were mostly used for testing purposed and we’re never released for public viewing anyway.)

In other cases I removed my self as an admin and/or participant on multi-user blogs that I no longer post to nor do they need my assistance. (For example, I set one up for a friend four years ago. They’ve not asked for my help for over two years, so I figured there was no use having admin access on their blog any more.)

So, overall, I didn’t need to play with to many actual settings, but I did do some house cleaning which is generally a good idea.

Last week, before I left town for the Nebraska Library Association conference, I received the first box of copies of my latest book, Blogging & RSS: A Librarian’s Guide, Second Edition. Yep, I’m a happy camper!

You can order it from Amazon or, if you’re going to be at Internet Librarian 2010 you can pick up an autographed copy there during the vendor reception at the ITI booth.

With the gracious help of Mr. Blake Carver at the amazing LISHost (The librarian’s Web hosting service) and an assist by Emily at the Nebraska Library Association this blog & site is powered by WordPress. Yes, I’ll provide details as to the whole process of moving from Blogger to WordPress in a later post.

I’ve been using Blogger since before Google owned it. This blog has been published using Blogger since day one. Yesterday I found out the the geniuses at Google have decided to abandon the .5% of their user base that knows what they’re doing and using FTP to publish to their own domain. Guess what? This blog is part of that .5%.

So, with the help of Blake and Karen, this blog should be moving to WordPress in the next few weeks. How will you know when it happens, well, I’m sure I’ll announce it for those of you reading the feed, and the few of you that actually visit this site will see a completely new template. (Just using a new WP template is much easier on the conversion than to try and convert the Blogger template.) So, if you’ve got any template suggestions feel free to leave them in the comments.

For those of you reading this blog via the feed you’ve probably received a bunch of old posts this morning. This is a result of fixing some invalid code in my template forcing a republication of the whole blog. These republished posts are then considered “new” by your aggregator. I believe this mini-project is done. You may now resume your regular feed reading.

I’ve noticed lately that when I publish a new post sometimes the publishing happens quickly, sometimes very slowly. The difference seemed to be in whether I included labels (categories) with the post. (For example, when creating a post with BlogThis! you can’t add labels so posts are published quickly. When posting via Blogger, I add labels and things publish slowly.) Well, the image at the right (shrunk since it’s huge,) “explains” the problem. Whenever you publish a new post with a label, whether one label or a dozen, Blogger republishes every page for every label you’ve ever used. So, in this example, I wrote a new post with one label, “blogosphere”, yet several hundred files were created, and SFTP’d to my server. All that should have been published are the four files: the post’s page, the main page, the archive page, and the page for the one label I used.

I’ll be submitting this to Blogger and will follow up here with any response I receive.